The closing of Lloyd's marked, in some inscrutable way, the close of the first period of Ellen Brewster's childhood. Looking back in later years, she always felt her retrospective thought strike a barrier there, beyond which her images of the past were confused. Yet it was difficult to tell why it was so, for after the first the child could, it seemed, have realized no difference in her life. Now and then she heard some of that conversation characterized at once by the confidence of wrong and injustice, and the logical doubt of it, by solid reasoning which, if followed far enough, refuted itself, by keen and unanswerable argument, and the wildest and most futile enthusiasm. But she had gained nothing except the conviction of the great wrongs of the poor of this earth and the awful tyranny of the rich, of the everlasting moaning of Lazarus at the gates and the cry for water later on from the depths of the rich man's hell. Somehow that last never comforted Ellen; she had no conception of the joy of the injured party over righteous retribution. She pitied the rich man and Lazarus impartially, yet all the time a spirit of fierce partisanship with these poor men was strengthening with her growth, their eloquence over their wrongs stirred her soul, and set her feet outside her childhood. Still, as before said, there was no tangible difference in her daily life. The little petted treasure of the Brewsters had all her small luxuries, sweets, and cushions of life, as well after as before the closing of Lloyd's. And the preparations for her aunt's wedding went on also. The sight of her lover sleigh-riding with her rival that afternoon had been too much for the resolution of Eva Loud's undisciplined nature. She had herself gone to Jim Tenny's house that evening, and called him to account, to learn that he had seriously taken her resolution not to marry at present to proceed from a fear that he would not provide properly for her, and that he had in this state of indignation been easily led by the sight of Aggie Bemis's pretty face in her front door, as he drove by, to stop. She had told Jim that she would marry him as she had agreed if he looked at matters in that way, and had passed Aggie Bemis's window leaning on Jim's arm with a side stare of triumph.
“Be you goin' to get married next month after what you said this mornin'?” her sister asked, half joyfully, half anxiously.
“Yes, I be,” was all Eva replied, and Fanny stared at her; she was so purely normal in her inconsistency as to seem almost the other thing.
The preparations for the wedding went on, but Eva never seemed as happy as she had done before the closing of Lloyd's. Jim Tenny could get no more work, and neither could Andrew.
Fanny lamented that the shop had closed at that time of year, for she had planned a Christmas tree of unprecedented splendor for Ellen, but Mrs. Zelotes was to be depended upon as usual, and Andrew told his wife to make no difference. “That little thing ain't goin' to be cheated nohow,” he said one night after Ellen had gone to bed and his visiting companions of the cutting-room had happened in.
“I know my children won't get much,” Joseph Atkins said, coughing as he spoke; “they wouldn't if Lloyd's hadn't shut down. I never see the time when I could afford to make any account of Christmas, much as ever I could manage a turkey Thanksgiving day.”
“The poor that the Lord died for can't afford to keep his birthday; it is the rich that he's going to cast into outer darkness, that keep it for their own ends, and it's a blasphemy and a mockery,” proclaimed Nahum Beals. He was very excited that night, and would often spring to his feet and stride across the room. There was another man there that night, a cousin of Joseph Atkins, John Sargent by name. He had recently moved to Rowe, since he had obtained work at McGuire's, “had accepted a position in the finishing-room of Mr. H. S. McGuire's factory in the city of Rowe,” as the item in the local paper put it. He was a young man, younger than his cousin, but he looked older. He had a handsome face, under the most complete control as to its muscles. When he laughed he gave the impression of the fixedness of merriment of a mask. He looked keenly at Nahum Beals with that immovable laugh on his face, and spoke with perfectly good-natured sarcasm. “All very well for the string-pieces of the bridge from oppression to freedom,” he said, “but you need some common-sense for the ties, or you'll slump.”
“What do you mean?”
“We ain't in the Old Testament, but the nineteenth century, and those old prophets, if they were alive to-day, would have to step down out of their flaming chariots and hang their mantles on the bushes, and instead of standing on mountain-tops and tellin' their enemies what rats they were, and how they would get what they deserved later on, they would have to tell their enemies what they wanted them to do to better matters, and make them do it.”
“Instead of standing by your own strike in Greenboro, you quit and come here to work in McGuire's the minute you got a chance,” said Nahum Beals, sullenly, and Sargent responded, with his unrelaxing laugh, “I left enough strikers for the situation in Greenboro; don't you worry about me.”
“I think he done quite right to quit the strike if he got a chance to work,” Joseph Atkins interposed. “Folks have got to look out for themselves, labor reform or no labor reform.”
“That's the corner-stone of labor reform, seems to me,” said Andrew.
“Seems to me sometimes you talk like a damned scab,” cried Nahum Beals, fiercely, red spots flickering in his thin cheeks. Andrew looked at him, and spoke with slow wrath. “Look here, Nahum Beals,” he said, “you're in my house, but I ain't goin' to stand no such talk as that, I can tell you.”
John Sargent laid a pacifically detaining hand on Nahum Beals's arm as he strode past him. “Oh, Lord, stop rampagin' up and down like a wildcat,” he said. “What good do you think you're doin' tearin' and shoutin' and insultin' people? He ain't talkin' like a scab, he's only talkin' a tie to your string-piece.”
“That's so,” said Joseph Atkins. Sargent boarded with him, and the board money was a godsend to him, now he was out of work. John Sargent had fixed his own price, and it was an unheard-of one for such simple fare as he had. His weekly dollars kept the whole poor family in food. But John Sargent was a bachelor, and earning remarkably good wages, and Joseph Atkins's ailing wife, whom illness and privation had made unnaturally grasping and ungrateful, told her cronies that it wasn't as if he couldn't afford it.
Up-stairs little Ellen lay in her bed, her doll in her arms, listening to the low rumble of masculine voices in the room below. Her mother had gone out, and there were only the men there. They were smoking, and the odor of their pipes floated up into Ellen's chamber through the door-cracks. She thought how her grandmother Brewster would sniff when she came in next day. She could hear her saying, “Well, for my part, if those men couldn't smoke their old pipes somewhere else besides in my sittin'-room, I wouldn't have 'em in the house.” But that reflection did not trouble Ellen very long, and she had never been disturbed herself by the odor of the pipes. She thought of them insensibly as the usual atmosphere when men were gathered together in any place except the church. She knew that they were talking about that old trouble, and Nahum Beals's voice of high wrath made her shrink; but, after all, she was removed from it all that night into a little prospective paradise of her own, which, as is the case in childhood, seemed to overgild her own future and all the troubles of the world. Christmas was only a week distant, she was to have a tree, and the very next evening her mother had promised to take her down-town and show her the beautiful, lighted Christmas shops. She wondered, listening to that rumble of discontent below, why grown-up men and women ever fretted when they were at liberty to go down-town every evening when they chose and look at the lighted shops, for she could still picture pure delight for others without envy or bitterness.
The next day the child was radiant; she danced rather than walked; she could not speak without a smile; she could eat nothing, for her happiness was so purely spiritual that desires of the flesh were in abeyance. Her heart beat fast; the constantly recurring memory of what was about to happen fairly overwhelmed her as with waves of delight.
“If you don't eat your supper you can't go, and that's all there is about it,” her mother told her when they were seated at the table, and Ellen sat dreaming before her toast and peach preserve.
“You must eat your supper, Ellen,” Andrew said, anxiously. Andrew had on his other coat, and he had shaved, and was going too, as was Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.
“She 'ain't eat a thing all day, she's so excited about goin',” Fanny said. “Now, Ellen, you must eat your supper, or you can't go—you'll be sick.”
And Ellen ate her supper, though exceeding joy as well as exceeding woe can make food lose its savor, and toast and preserves were as ashes on her tongue when the very fragrance of coming happiness was in her soul.
When, finally, in hand of her mother, while Andrew walked behind with her grandmother, she went towards the lights of the town, she had a feeling as of wings on her feet. However, she walked soberly enough with wide eyes of amazement and delight at everything—the long, silver track of the snowy road under the light of the full moon, the slants of the house roofs sparkling with crusts of crystals, the lighted windows set with house plants, for the dwellers in the outskirts of Rowe loved house plants, and their front windows bloomed with the emulative splendor of geraniums from fall to spring. She saw behind them glimpses of lives and some doings as real as her own, but mysterious under the locks of other personalities, and therefore as full of possibilities of preciousness as the sheet of morning dew over a neighbor's yard; she had often believed she saw diamonds sparkle in that, though never in her own. She had proved it otherwise too often. So Ellen, seeing through a window a little girl of her own age in a red frock, straightway believed it to be satin of the richest quality, and, seeing through another window a tea-table spread, had no doubt that the tin teapot was silver. A girl with a crown of yellow braids pulled down a curtain, and she thought her as beautiful as an angel; but of all this she said nothing at all, only walked soberly on, holding fast to her mother's hand.
When they were half-way to the shops, a door of a white house close to the road flew open and shut again with a bang, there was a scurry and grating slide on the front walk, then the gate was thrown back, and a boy dashed through with a wild whoop, just escaping contact with Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. “You'd better be careful,” said she, sharply. “It ain't the thing for boys to come tearin' out of yards in the evenin' without seein' where they are goin'.”
The boy cast an abashed glance at her. The street-lamp shone full on his face, which was round and reddened by the frosty winds, with an aimlessly grinning mouth of uncertain youth, and black eyes with a bold and cheerful outlook on the unknown. He was only ten, but he was large for his age. Ellen, when he looked from her grandmother back at her, thought him almost a man, and then she saw that he was the boy who had brought the chestnuts to her the night when she had returned from her runaway excursion. The boy recognized her at the same moment, and his mouth seemed to gape wider, and a moist red overspread his face down to his swathing woollen scarf. Then he gave another whoop significant of the extreme of nervous abashedness and the incipient defiance of his masculine estate, there was a flourish of heels, followed by a swift glimmering slide of steel, and he was off trailing his sled.
“That's that Joy boy that brought Ellen the chestnuts that time,” Fanny said. “Do you remember him, Ellen?”
“Yes, ma'am,” replied Ellen. The look of the boy in her face had bewildered and confused her, without her knowing the why of it. It was as if she had spelled a word in her reading-book whose meaning she could not grasp.
“I don't care who he is,” said Mrs. Zelotes, “he 'ain't no business racin' out of gates that way, and his folks hadn't ought to let a boy no older than that out alone of nights.”
They kept on, and the boy apparently left them far behind in his career of youthful exuberance, until they came to the factories. Andrew looked up at the windows of Lloyd's, dark except for a faint glimmer in a basement window from the lamp of the solitary watchman, and drew a heavy sigh.
“It ain't as bad for you as it is for some,” his mother said, sharply, and then she jumped aside, catching her son's arm as the boy sprang out of a covering shadow under the wall of Lloyd's and dashed before them with another wild whoop and another glance of defiant bashfulness at Ellen.
“My land! it's that boy again,” cried Mrs. Zelotes. “Here, you boy!—boy! What's your name?”
“His name is Granville Joy,” Ellen replied, unexpectedly.
“Why, how did you know, child?” her grandmother asked. “Seems to me he's got a highfalutin' name enough. Here you, Granville—if that's your name—don't you know any better than to—” But the boy was gone, his sled creaking on the hard snow at his heels, and a faint whoop sounded from the distance.
“I guess if I had the bringin' up of that boy there wouldn't be such doin's,” said Mrs. Zelotes, severely. “His mother's a pretty woman, but I don't believe she's got much force. She wouldn't have given him such a name if she had.”
“She named him after the town she came from,” said Fanny. “She told me once. She's a real smart woman, and she makes that boy stand around.”
“She must; it looks as if he was standin' round pretty lively jest now,” said Mrs. Zelotes. “Namin' of a boy after a town! They'd better wait and name a town after the boy if he amounts to anything.”
“His mother told me he was goin' into the first grammar-school next year,” said Fanny.
“I pity the teacher,” said Mrs. Zelotes, and then she recoiled, for the boy made another dart from behind a lamp-post, crossed their path, and was off again.
“My land!” gasped Mrs. Zelotes, “you speak to him, Andrew.” But Andrew laughed. “Might as well speak to a whirlwind,” said he. “He ain't doin' any harm, mother; it's only his boyish antics. For Heaven's sake, let him enjoy himself while he can, it won't be long before the grind-mill in there will get hold of him, and then he'll be sober enough to suit anybody,” and Andrew pointed at Lloyd's as he spoke.
“Boys can be boys,” said Mrs. Zelotes, severely, “and they can have a good time, but they can behave themselves.”
None of them looking after that flying and whooping figure ahead had the slightest idea of the true situation. They did not know that the boy was confused by the fires, none the less ardent that they were so innocent, of a first love for Ellen; that, ever since he had seen her little, fair face on her aunt's shoulder the day when she was found, it had been even closer to his heart than his sled and his jackstones and his ball, and his hope of pudding for dinner. They did not know that he had toiled at the wood-pile of a Saturday, and run errands after school, to earn money to buy Christmas presents for his mother and Ellen; that he had at that very minute in his purse in the bottom of his pocket the sum of eighty-nine cents, mostly in coppers, since his wage was generally payable in that coin, and his pocket sagged arduously therefrom. They did not know that he was even then bound upon an errand to the grocery store for a bag of flour to be brought home on his sled, and would thereby swell his exchequer by another cent. They did not know what dawning chords of love, and knowledge of love, that wild whoop expressed; and the boy dodged and darted and hid, and appeared before them all the way to the busy main street of Rowe; and, after they had entered the great store where the finest Christmas display was held, he stood before the window staring at Ellen vanishing in a brilliant vista, and whooped now and then, regardless of public opinion.
Ellen, when once she was inside the store, forgot everything else. She clung more tightly to her mother's hand, as one will cling to any wonted stay of love in the midst of strangeness, even of joy, and she saw everything with eyes which photographed it upon her very soul. At first she had an impression of a dazzling incoherence of splendor, of a blare as of thousands of musical instruments all sounding different notes of delight, of a weaving pattern of colors, too intricate to master, of a mingled odor of paint and varnish, and pine and hemlock boughs, and then she spelled out the letters of the details. She looked at those counters set with the miniature paraphernalia of household life which give the first sweet taste of domesticity and housekeeping joys to a little girl.
There were the sets of dolls' furniture, and the dolls, dishes, and there was a counter with dolls' cooking-stoves and ranges bristling with the most delightful realism of pots and pans, at which she gazed so fixedly and breathlessly that she looked almost stupid. Her elders watched half in delight, half with pain, that they could not purchase everything at which she looked. Mrs. Zelotes bought some things surreptitiously, hiding the parcels under her shawl. Andrew, whispering to a salesman, asked the price of a great cooking-stove at which Ellen looked long. When he heard the amount he sighed. Fanny touched his arm comfortingly. “There would be no sense in your buying that, if you had all the money in creation,” she said, in a hushed voice. “There's a twenty-five-cent one that's good enough. I'm going to buy that for her to-morrow. She'll never know the difference.” But Andrew Brewster, nevertheless, went through the great, dazzling shop with his heart full of bitterness. It seemed to him monstrous and incredible that he had a child as beautiful and altogether wonderful as that, and could not buy the whole stock for her if she wanted it. He had never in his whole life wanted anything for himself that he could not have, enough to give him pain, but he wanted for his child with a longing that was a passion. Her little desires seemed to him the most important and sacred needs in the whole world. He watched her with pity and admiration, and shame at his own impotence of love to give her all.
But Ellen knew nothing of it. She was radiant. She never thought of wanting all those treasures further than she already had them. She gazed at the wonders in that department where the toy animals were kept, and which resembled a miniature menagerie, the silence broken by the mooing of cows, the braying of donkeys, the whistle of canaries, and the roars of mock-lions when their powers were invoked by the attendants, and her ears drank in that discordant bable of tiny mimicry like music. There was no spirit of criticism in her. She was utterly pleased with everything.
When her grandmother held up a toy-horse and said the fore-legs were too long, Ellen wondered what she meant. To her mind it was more like a horse than any real one she had ever seen.
As she gazed at the decorations, the wreaths, the gauze, the tinsel, and paper angels, suspended by invisible wires over the counters, and all glittering and shining and twinkling with light, a strong whiff of evergreen fragrance came to her, and the aroma of fir-balsam, and it was to her the very breath of all the mysterious joy and hitherto untasted festivity of this earth into which she had come. She felt deep in her childish soul the sense of a promise of happiness in the future, of which this was a foretaste. When she went into the department where the dolls dwelt, she fairly turned pale. They swung, and sat, and lay, and stood, as in angelic ranks, all smiling between shining fluffs of hair. It was a chorus of smiles, and made the child's heart fairly leap. She felt as if all the dolls were smiling at her. She clung fast to her mother's hand, and hid her face against her skirt.
“Why, what is the matter, Ellen?” Fanny asked. Ellen looked up, and smiled timidly and confusedly, then at the dazzle of waxen faces and golden locks above skirts of delicate pink and blue and white, like flower petals.
“You never saw so many dolls together before, did you, Ellen?” said Andrew; then he added, wistfully, “There ain't one of 'em any bigger and prettier than your own doll, be they, Ellen?” And that, although he had never recovered from his uneasiness about that mysterious doll.
Ellen had not seen Cynthia Lennox since that morning several weeks ago when she had run away from her, except one glimpse when she was sleigh-riding. Now all at once, when they had stopped to look at some wonderful doll-houses, she saw her face to face. Ellen had been gazing with rapture at a great doll-house completely furnished, and Andrew had made one of his miserable side inquiries as to its price, and Fanny had said, quite loud, “Lord, Andrew, you might just as well ask the price of the store! You know such a thing as that is out of the question for any child unless her father is rich as Norman Lloyd,” and Ellen, who had not noticed what they were saying, looked up, when a faint breath of violets smote her sense with a quick memory, and there was the strange lady who had taken her into her house and kept her and given her the doll, the strange lady whom the gentleman said might be punished for keeping her if people were to know.
Cynthia Lennox went pale when, without knowing what was going to happen, she looked down and saw suddenly the child's innocent face looking into hers. She stood wavering in her trailing, fur-lined, and softly whispering draperies, so marked and set aside by her grace and elegance and countenance of superiority and proud calm that people turned to look after her more than after many a young beauty, and did not, for a second, know what to say or do. She had no mind to shrink from a recognition of the child; she had no fear of the result, but there was a distinct shrinking at a scene with that flashing-eyed and heavy-browed mother of the child in such a place as that. She would undoubtedly speak very loud. She expected the volley of recrimination in a high treble which would follow the announcement in that sweet little flute which she remembered so well.
“Mamma, that is the lady who kept me, and would not let me go home.”
But Ellen, after a second's innocent and startled regard, turned away with no more recognition than if she had been a stranger. She turned her little back to her, and looked at the doll-house. A great flush flamed over Cynthia Lennox's face, and a qualm of mortal shame. She took an impetuous glide forward, and was just about to speak and tell the truth, whatever the consequences, and not be outdone in magnanimity by that child, when a young girl with a sickly but impudent and pretty face jostled her rudely. The utter pertness of her ignorant youth knew no respect for even the rich Miss Cynthia Lennox. “Here's your parcel, lady,” she said, in her rough young voice, its shrillness modified by hoarseness from too much shouting for cash boys during this busy season, and she thrust, with her absent eyes upon a gentleman coming towards her, a parcel into Cynthia's hands. Somehow the touch of that parcel seemed to bring Cynthia to her senses. It was a kodak which she had been purchasing for the little boy who had lived with her, and whom it had almost broken her heart to lose. She remembered what her friend Lyman Risley had said, that it might make trouble for others besides herself. She took her parcel with that involuntary meekness which the proudest learn before the matchless audacity of youthful ignorance when it fairly asserts itself, and passed out of the store to her waiting carriage. Ellen saw her.
“That was Cynthia Lennox, wasn't it?” Fanny said, with something like awe. “Wasn't that an elegant cloak she had on? I guess it was Russian sable.”
“I don't care if it was, it ain't a mite handsomer than my cape lined with squirrel,” said Mrs. Zelotes.
Ellen looked intently at a game on the counter. It was ten o'clock when Ellen went home. She had been into all the principal stores which were decorated for Christmas. Her brain resembled a kaleidoscope as she hurried along at her mother's hand. Every thought seemed to whirl the disk, and new and more dazzling combinations appeared, but the principle which underlay the whole was that of the mystery of festivity and joy upon the face of the earth, of which this Christmas wealth was the key.
The Brewsters had scarcely reached the factory neighborhood when there was a swift bound ahead of them and the familiar whoop.
“There's that boy again,” said Mrs. Zelotes.
She made various remonstrances, and even Andrew, when the boy had passed his own home in his persistent dogging of them, called out to him, as did Fanny, but he was too far ahead to hear. The boy followed them quite to their gate, proceeding with wild spurts and dashes from shadow to shadow, and at last reappeared from behind one of the evergreen trees in the west yard, springing out of its long shadow with strange effect. He darted close to Ellen as she passed in the gate, crammed something into her hand, and was gone. Andrew could not catch him, though he ran after him. “He ran like a rabbit,” he said, coming breathlessly into the house, where they were looking at the treasure the boy had thrust upon Ellen. It was a marvel of a patent top, which the boy had long desired to own. He had spent all his money on it, and his mother was cheated of her Christmas present, but he had given, and Ellen had received, her first token of love.
The next spring Ellen went to school. When a child who has reigned in undisputed sovereignty at home is thrust among other children at school, one of two things happens: either she is scorned and rebelled against, and her little crown of superiority rolled in the dust of the common playground, or she extends the territories of her empire. Ellen extended hers, though involuntarily, for there was no conscious thirst for power in her.
On her first morning at school, she seated herself at her desk and looked forth from the golden cloud of her curls, her eyes full of innocent contemplation, her mouth corners gravely drooping. She knew one little girl who sat not far from her. The little girl's name was Floretta Vining. Floretta was built on the scale of a fairy, with tiny, fine, waxen features, a little tossing mane of flaxen hair, eyes a most lovely and perfect blue, with no more depth in them than in the blue of china, and an expression of the sweetest and most innocent inanity and irresponsibility. Nobody ever expected anything of this little Floretta Vining. She was always a negative success. She smiled around from the foot of her curving class, and never had her lessons, but she never disobeyed the rules, except that of punctuality.
Floretta was late at school. She came daintily up the aisle, two cheap bangles on one wrist slipping over a slim hand, and tinkling. Floretta's mother had a taste for the cheaply decorative. There was an abundance of coarse lace on Floretta's frock, and she wore a superfluous sash which was not too fresh. Floretta toed out excessively, her slender little feet pointing out sharply, almost at right angles with each other, and Ellen admired her for that. She watched her coming, planting each foot as carefully and precisely as a bird, her lace frills flouncing up and down, her bangles jingling, and thought how very pretty she was.
Ellen felt herself very loving towards the teacher and Floretta Vining. Floretta leaned forward as soon as she was seated and gazed at her with astonishment, and that deepening of amiability and general sweetness which one can imagine in the face of a doll after persistent scrutiny. Ellen smiled decorously, for she was not sure how much smiling was permissible in school. When she smiled guardedly at Floretta, she was conscious of another face regarding her, twisted slightly over a shabby little shoulder covered with an ignominious blue stuff, spotted and faded. This little girl's wisp of brown braid was tied with a shoe-string, and she looked poorer than any other child in the school, but she had an honest light in her eyes, and Ellen considered her to be rather more beautiful than Floretta.
She was Maria Atkins, Joseph Atkins's second child. Ellen sat with her book before her, and the strange, new atmosphere of the school-room stole over her senses. It was not altogether pleasant, although it was considered that the ventilation was after the most approved modern system. She perceived a strong odor of peppermints, and Floretta Vining was waving ostentatiously a coarse little pocket-handkerchief scented with New-mown Hay. There was also a strong effusion of stale dinners and storm-beaten woollen garments, but there was, after all, that savor of festivity which Ellen was apt to discover in the new. She looked over her book with utter content. In a line with her, on the boys' side, there appeared a covertly peeping face under a thatch of light hair, and Ellen, influenced insensibly by the boy's shyly worshipful eyes, looked and saw Granville Joy. She remembered the Christmas top, and blushed very pink without knowing why, and flirted all her curls towards the boys' side.
Ellen, from having so little acquaintance with boys, had had no very well-defined sentiments towards them, but now, on being set apart with her feminine element, and separated so definitely by the middle aisle of the school-room, she began to experience sensations both of shyness and exclusiveness. She did not think the boys, in their coarse clothes, with their cropped heads, half as pretty as the girls.
The teacher coming down the aisle laid a caressing hand on Ellen's curls, and the child looked up at her with that confidence which is exquisite flattery.
After she had passed, Ellen heard a subtle whisper somewhere at her back; it was half audible, but its meaning was entirely plain. It signified utmost scorn and satirical contempt. It was fine-pointed and far-reaching. A number looked around. It was as expressive as a whole sentence, and, being as concentrated, was fairly explosive with meaning.
“H'm, ain't you pretty? Ain't you dreadful pretty, little dolly-pinky-rosy. H'm, teacher's partial. Ain't you pretty? Ain't you stuck up? H'm.”
Ellen, not being used to the school vernacular, did not fairly apprehend all this, and least of all that it was directed towards herself. She cast a startled look around, then turned to her book. She leaned back in her seat and held her book before her face with both hands, and began to read, spelling out the words noiselessly. All at once, she felt a fine prick on her head, and threw back one hand and turned quickly. The little girl behind was engrossed in study, and all Ellen could see was the parting in her thick black hair, for her head was supported by her two hands, her elbows were resting on her desk, and she was whispering the boundaries of the State of Massachusetts.
Ellen turned back to her reading-book, and recommenced studying with the painful faithfulness of the new student; then came again that small, fine, exasperating prick, and she thrust her face around quickly to see that same faithfully intent little girl.
Ellen rubbed her head doubtfully, and tried to fix her attention again upon her book, but presently it came again; a prick so small and fine that it strained consciousness; an infinitesimal point of torture, and this time Ellen, turning with a swift flirt of her head, caught the culprit. It was that faithful little girl, who held a black-headed belt-pin in her hand; she had been carefully separating one hair at a time from Ellen's golden curls, and tweaking it out.
Ellen looked at her with a singular expression compounded of bewilderment, of injury, of resentment, of alarm, and of a readiness to accept it all as a somewhat peculiar advance towards good-fellowship and a merry understanding. But the expression on that dark, somewhat grimy little face, looking out at her from a jungle of coarse, black locks, was fairly impish, almost malicious. There was not merriment in it so much as jibing; instead of that soft regard and worshipful admiration which Ellen was accustomed to find in new eyes, there was resentful envy.
Then Ellen shrank, and bristled with defiance at the same time, for she had the spirit of both the Brewsters and the Louds in her, in spite of her delicacy of organization. She was a fine instrument, capable of chords of tragedy as well as angelic strains. She saw that the little girl who was treating her so was dressed very poorly, that her dress was not only shabby, but actually dirty; that she, as well as the other girl whom she noticed, had her braid tied with an old shoe-string, and that a curious smell of leather pervaded her. Ellen continued to regard the little girl, then suddenly she felt a hand on her shoulder, and the teacher, Miss Rebecca Mitchell, was looking down at her. “What is the trouble?” asked Miss Mitchell. That look of half-wondering admiration to which Ellen was accustomed was in the teacher's eyes, and Ellen again thought her beautiful.
One of the first, though a scarcely acknowledged principle of beauty, is that of reflection of the fairness of the observer. Ellen being as innocently self-seeking for love and admiration as any young thing for its natural sustenance, was quick to recognize it, though she did not understand that what she saw was herself in the teacher's eyes, and not the teacher. She gazed up in that roseate face with the wide mouth set in an inverted bow of smile, curtained, as it were, with smoothly crinkled auburn hair clearly outlined against the cheeks, at the palpitating curve of shiny black-silk bosom, adorned with a festoon of heavy gold watch-chain, and thought that here was love, and beauty, and richness, and elegance, and great wisdom, calling for reverence but no fear. She answered not one word to the teacher's question, but continued to gaze at her with that look of wide-eyed and contemplative regard.
“What is the trouble, Ellen?” repeated Miss Mitchell. “Why were you looking around so?” Ellen said nothing. The little girl behind had her head bent over her book so low that the sulky curves of her mouth did not show. The teacher turned to her—“Abby Atkins,” said she, “what were you doing?”
Abby Atkins did not raise her studious head. She did not seem to hear.
“Abby Atkins,” said the teacher, sharply, “answer me. What were you doing?” Then the little girl answered, with a sulky note, half growl, half whimper, like some helpless but indomitable little trapped animal, “Nothin'.”
“Ellen,” said the teacher, and her voice changed indescribably. “What was she doing?” Ellen did not answer. She looked up in the teacher's face, then cast down her eyes and sat there, her little hands folded in tightly clinched fists in her lap, her mouth a pink line of resistance. “Ellen,” repeated the teacher, and she tried to make her voice sharp, but in spite of herself it was caressing. Her heart had gone out to the child the moment she had seen her enter the school-room. She was as helpless before her as before a lover. She was wild to catch her up and caress her instead of pestering her with questions. “Ellen, you must answer me,” she said, but Ellen sat still.
Half the scholars were on their feet, reaching and craning their necks. The teacher turned on them, and there was no lack of sharpness in her tone. “Sit down this moment, every one of you,” she called. “Abby Atkins, if there is any more disturbance, I shall know what is at the root of the matter. If I see you turning around again, Ellen, I shall insist upon knowing why.” Then the teacher placed a caressing hand upon Ellen's yellow head, and passed down the aisle to her desk.
Ellen had no more trouble during the session. Abby Atkins was commendably quiet and studious, and when called out to recitation made the best one in her class. She was really brilliant in a defiant, reluctant fashion. However, though she did not again disturb Ellen's curls, she glowered at her with furtive but unrelaxed hostility over her book. Especially a blue ribbon which confined Ellen's curls in a beautiful bow fired her eyes of animosity. She looked hard at it, then she pulled her black braid over her shoulder and felt of the hard shoe-string knot, and frowned with an ugly frown of envy and bitterest injury, and asked herself the world-wide and world-old question as to the why of inequality, and, though it was based on such trivialities as blue ribbons and shoe-strings, it was none the less vital to her mind. She would have loved, have gloried, to pull off that blue ribbon, put it on her own black braid, and tie up those yellow curls with her own shoe-string with a vicious yank of security. But all the time it was not so much because she wanted the ribbon as because she did not wish to be slighted in the distribution of things. Abby Atkins cared no more for personal ornament than a wild cat, but she wanted her just allotment of the booty of the world. So at recess she watched her chance. Ellen was surrounded by an admiring circle of big girls, gushing with affection. “Oh, you dear little thing,” they said. “Only look at her beautiful curls. Give me a kiss, won't you, darling?” Little reverent fingers twined Ellen's golden curls, red apples were thrust forward for her to take bites, sticky morsels of candy were forced secretly into her hands. Abby Atkins stood aloof. “You mean little thing,” one of the big girls said suddenly, catching hold of her thin shoulder and shaking her—“you mean little thing, I saw you.”
“So did I,” said another big girl, “and I was a good mind to tell on you.”
“Yes, you had better look out, and not plague that dear little thing,” said the other.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” chimed in still another big girl. “Only look how pretty she is, the little darling—the idea of your tormenting her. You deserve a good, hard whipping, Abby Atkins.”
This big girl was herself a beauty and wore a fine and precise blue-ribbon bow, and Abby Atkins looked at her with a scowl of hatred.
“She's an ugly little thing,” said the big girls among themselves as they went edging gently and imperceptibly away towards a knot of big boys, and then Abby Atkins's chance had come. She advanced with a spring upon Ellen Brewster, and she pulled that blue ribbon off her head so cruelly and fiercely that she pulled out some of the golden hairs with it and threw it on the ground, and stamped on it. Then she seized Ellen by the shoulders and proceeded to shake her for wearing a blue ribbon when she herself wore a shoe-string, but she reckoned without Ellen. One would as soon have expected to meet fight in a little child angel as in this Ellen Brewster, but she did not come of her ancestors for nothing.
Although she was so daintily built that she looked smaller, she was in reality larger than the other girl, and as she straightened herself in her wrath she seemed a head taller and proportionately broad. She tossed her yellow head, and her face took on an expression of noble courage and indignation, but she never said a word. She simply took Abby Atkins by the arms and lifted her off her feet and seated her on the ground. Then she picked up her blue ribbon, and walked off, and Abby scrambled to her feet and looked after her with a vanquished but untamed air. Nobody had seen what happened except Abby's younger sister Maria and Granville Joy. Granville pressed stealthily close to Ellen as she marched away and whispered, his face blazing, his voice full of confidence and congratulation, “Say, if she'd been a boy, I'd licked her for you, and you wouldn't hev had to tech her yourself;” and Maria walked up and eyes her prostrate but defiantly glaring sister—“I ain't sorry one mite, Abby Atkins,” she declared—“so there.”
“You go 'long,” returned Abby, struggling to her feet, and shaking her small skirts energetically.
“Your dress is jest as wet as if you'd set down in a puddle, and you'll catch it when you get home,” Maria said, pitilessly.
“I ain't afraid.”
“What made you touch her, anyhow; she hadn't done nothin'?”
“If you want to wear shoe-strings when other folks wear ribbons, you can,” said Abby Atkins. She walked away, switching, with unabated dignity in the midst of defeat, the draggled tail of her poor little dress. She had gone down like a cat; she was not in the least hurt except in her sense of justice; that was jarred to a still greater lack of equilibrium. She felt as if she had been floored by Providence in conjunction with a blue bow, and her very soul rose in futile rebellion. But, curiously enough, her personal ire against Ellen vanished.
At the afternoon recess she gave Ellen the sound half of an old red Baldwin apple which she had brought for luncheon, and watched her bite into it, which Ellen did readily, for she was not a child to cherish enmity, with an odd triumph. “The other half ain't fit to eat, it's all wormy,” said Abby Atkins, flinging it away as she spoke.
“Then you ought to have kept this,” Ellen cried out, holding towards her the half, minus one little bite. But Abby Atkins shook her head forcibly. “That was why I gave it to you,” said she. “Say, didn't you never have to tie up your hair with a shoe-string?” Ellen shook her head, looking at her wonderingly. Then with a sudden impulse she tore off the blue ribbon from her curls. “Say, you take it,” she said, “my mother won't care. I'd just as lief wear the shoe-string, honest.”
“I don't want your blue ribbon,” Abby returned, stoutly; “a shoe-string is a good deal better to tie the hair with. I don't want your blue ribbon; I don't want no blue ribbon unless it's mine.”
“It would be yours if I give it to you,” Ellen declared, with blue eyes of astonishment and consternation upon this very strange little girl.
“No, it wouldn't,” maintained Abby Atkins.
But it ended in the two girls, with that wonderful and inexplicable adjustment of childhood into one groove after harsh grating on different levels, walking off together with arms around each other's waist, and after school began Ellen often felt a soft, cat-like pat on her head, and turned round with a loving glance at Abby Atkins.
Ellen talked more about Abby Atkins than any other of the children when she got home, and while her mother looked at it all easily, her grandmother was doubtful. “There's others that I should rather have Ellen thick with,” said she. “I 'ain't nothin' against the Atkinses, but they can't have been as well brought up as some, they have had so little to do with, and their mother's been ailin' so long.”
“Ellen may as well begin as she can hold out, and be intimate with them that will be intimate with her,” Eva said, rather bitterly. Eva was married by this time, and living with Jim and his mother. She wore in those days an expression of bitterly defiant triumph and happiness, as of one who has wrested his sweet from fate under the ban of the law, and is determined to get the flavor of it though the skies fall. “I suppose I did wrong marrying Jim,” she often told her sister, “but I can't help it.”
“Maybe Jim will get work before long,” her sister would say, consolingly.
“I have about given up,” Eva would reply. “I guess Jim will have to roost on a flour-barrel at Munsey's store the rest of his days; but as long as he belongs to me, it don't make so much difference.”
Eva had taken up an agency for a cosmetic which was manufactured by a woman in Rowe. She had one window of the north parlor in the Tenny cottage, which had been given up to her when she married Jim, filled with the little pink boxes containing the “Fairy Cream,” and a great sign, but the trade languished. Both Eva and Jim had tried in vain to obtain employment in factories in other towns.
Lloyd's had not reopened, although it was April, and Andrew was drawing on his savings. Fanny had surreptitiously answered an advertisement purporting to give instructions to women as to the earning of large sums of money at home, and was engaged with a stock of glass and paints which she hurriedly swept out of sight when any one's shadow passed the window, and later she found herself to be the victim of a small swindling conspiracy, and lost the dollar which she had invested. But Ellen knew nothing of all this. She lacked none of her accustomed necessaries nor luxuries, and with her school a new life full of keen, new savors or relish began for her. There were also new affections in it.
Ellen was as yet too young, and too confident in love, to have new affections plunge her into anything but a delightful sort of anti-blossom tumult. There was no suspense, no doubt, no jealousy, only utter acquiescence of single-heartedness, admiration, and trust. She thought Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining lovely and dependable; she parted from them at night without a pang, and looked forward blissfully to the meeting next morning. She also had sentiments equally peaceful and pronounced, though instinctively more secret, towards Granville Joy. She used to glance over towards the boys' side and meet his side-long eyes without so much a quickening of her pulses as a quickening of her imagination.
“I know who your beau is,” Floretta Vining, who was in advance of her years, said to her once, and Ellen looked at her with half-stupid wonder.
“His first name begins with a G and his last with a J,” Floretta tittered, and Ellen continued to look at her with the faintest suspicion of a blush, because she had a feminine instinct that a blush was in order, not because she knew of any reason for it.
“He is,” said Floretta, with another exceedingly foolish giggle. “My, you are as red as a beet.”
“I ain't old enough to have a beau,” Ellen said, her soft cheeks becoming redder, and her baby face all in a tremor.
“Yes, you be,” Floretta said, with authority, “because you are so pretty, and have got such pretty curls. Ben Simonds said the other day you were the prettiest girl in school.”
“Then do you think he is my beau, too?” asked Ellen, innocently. But Floretta frowned, and tittered, and hesitated.
“He said except one,” she faltered out, finally.
“Well, who was that?” asked Ellen.
“How do I know?” pouted Floretta. “Mebbe it was me, though I don't think I'm so very pretty.”
“Then Ben Simonds is your beau,” said Ellen, reflectively.
“Yes, I guess he is,” admitted Floretta.
That night, amid much wonder and tender ridicule, Ellen told her mother and Aunt Eva, and her father, that Ben Simonds was Floretta's beau, and Granville Joy was hers. But Andrew laughed doubtfully.
“I don't want that little thing to get such ideas into her head yet a while,” he told Fanny afterwards, but she only laughed at him, seeing nothing but the childish play of the thing; but he, being a man, saw deeper.
However, Ellen's fondest new love was not for any of her little mates, but for her school-teacher. To her the child's heart went out in worship. All through the spring she offered her violets—violets gathered laboriously after school in the meadow back of her grandmother's house. She used to skip from hillock to hillock of marsh grass with wary steps, lest she might slip and wet her feet in the meadow ooze and incur her mother's displeasure, for Fanny, in spite of her worship of the child, could speak with no uncertain voice. She pulled up handfuls of the flowers, gleaming blue in the dark-green hollows. Later she carried roses from the choice bush in the yard, and, later, pears from her grandmother's tree. She used to watch for Miss Mitchell at her gate and run to meet her, and seize her hand and walk at her side, blushing with delight. Miss Mitchell lived not far from Ellen, in a tidy white house with a handsome smoke-tree on one side of the front walk and a willow with upside-down branches on the other. Miss Mitchell had been born and brought up in this house, but she had been teaching school in a distant town ever since Ellen's day, so they had never been acquainted before she went to school. Miss Mitchell lived alone with her mother, who was an old friend of Mrs. Zelotes. Ellen privately thought her rather better-looking than her own grandmother, though her admiration was based upon wholly sentimental reasons. Old Mrs. Mitchell might have earned more money in a museum of freaks than her daughter in a district school. She was a mountain of rotundity, a conjunction of palpitating spheres, but the soul that dwelt in this painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. Mitchell beautiful. Mrs. Mitchell never failed to regale her with a superior sort of cooky, and often with a covert peppermint, and that although the Mitchells were not well off. The old place was mortgaged, and Miss Mitchell had hard work to pay the interest. Ellen had the vaguest ideas about the mortgage, and was half inclined to think it might be a disfiguring patch in the plastering of the sitting-room, which hung down in an unsightly fashion with a disclosure of hairy edges, and threatened danger to the heads underneath.
Often of a Saturday afternoon Ellen went to visit Miss Mitchell and her mother, and really preferred them to friends of her own age. Miss Mitchell had a store of superannuated paper dolls which dated from her own childhood. Their quaint costumes, and old-fashioned coiffures, and simpers were of overwhelming interest to Ellen. Even at that early age she had a perception of the advantages of an atmosphere to art, and even to the affections. Without understanding it, she loved those obsolete paper-dolls and those women of former generations better because they gave her breathing-scope for her imagination. She could love Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining at one bite, as it were, and that was the end of it, but she could sit and ponder and dream over Miss Mitchell and her mother, and see whole vistas of them in receding mirrors of affection.
As for the teacher and her mother, they simply adored the child—as indeed everybody did. She continued at her first school for a year, which was one of the hardest financially ever experienced in Rowe. Norman Lloyd during all that time did not reopen his factory, and in the autumn two others shut down. The streets were full of the discontented ranks of impotent labor, and all the public buildings were props for the weary shoulders of the unemployed. On pleasant days the sunny sides of the vacant factories, especially, furnished settings for lines of scowling faces of misery.
This atmosphere affected Ellen more than any one realized, since the personal bearing of it was kept from her. She did not know that her father was drawing upon his precious savings for daily needs, she did not know how her aunt Eva and her uncle Jim were getting into greater difficulties every day, but she was too sensitive not to be aware of disturbances which were not in direct contact with herself. She never forgot what she had overheard that night Lloyd's had shut down; it was always like a blot upon the face of her happy consciousness of life. She often overheard, as then, those loud, dissenting voices of her father and his friends in the sitting-room, after she had gone to bed; and then, too, Abby Atkins, who was not spared any knowledge of hardship, told her a good deal. “It's awful the way them rich folks treat us,” said Abby Atkins. “They own the shops and everything, and take all the money, and let our folks do all the work. It's awful. But then,” continued Abby Atkins, comfortingly, “your father has got money saved in the bank, and he owns his house, so you can get along if he don't have work. My father 'ain't got any, and he's got the old-fashioned consumption, and he coughs, and it takes money for his medicine. Then mother's sick a good deal too, and has to have medicine. We have to have more medicine than most anything else, and we hardly ever have any pie or cake, and it's all the fault of them rich folks.” Abby Atkins wound up with a tragic climax and a fierce roll of her black eyes.
That evening Ellen went in to see her grandmother, and was presented with some cookies, which she did not eat.
“Why don't you eat them?” Mrs. Zelotes asked.
“Can I have them to do just what I want to with?” asked Ellen.
“What on earth do you want to do with a cooky except eat it?” Ellen blushed; she had a shamed-faced feeling before a contemplated generosity.
“What do you want to do with them except eat them?” her grandmother asked, severely.
“Abby Atkins don't have any cookies 'cause her father's out of work,” said Ellen, abashedly.
“Did that Atkins girl ask you to bring her cookies?”
“No, ma'am.”
“You can do jest what you are a mind to with 'em,” Mrs. Zelotes said, abruptly.
Ellen never knew why her grandmother insisted upon her drinking a little glass of very nice and very spicy cordial before she went home, but the truth was, that Mrs. Zelotes thought the child so angelic in this disposition to give up the cookies which she loved to her little friend that she was straightway alarmed and thought her too good to live.
The next day she told Fanny, and said to her, with her old face stern with anxiety, that the child was lookin' real pindlin', and Ellen had to take bitters for a month afterwards because she gave the cookies to Abby Atkins.
In all growth there is emulation and striving for precedence between the spiritual and the physical, and this very emulation may determine the rate of progression of the whole. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, may be in advance, but all the time the tendency is towards the distant goal. Sometimes the two keep abreast, and then there is the greatest harmony in speed. In Ellen Brewster at twelve and fifteen the spiritual outstripped the physical, as is often the case. Her eyes grew intense and hollow with reflection under knitting brows, her thin shoulders stooped like those of a sage bent with study and contemplation. She was slender to emaciation; her clothes hung loosely over her form, which seemed as sexless as a lily-stem; indeed, her body seemed only made for the head, which was flower-like and charming, but almost painful in its delicacy, and with such weight of innocent pondering upon the unknown conditions of things in which she found herself. At times, of course, there were ebullitions of youthful spirit, and the child was as inconsequent as a kitten. At those times she was neither child nor woman; she was an anomalous thing made up not so much of actualities as of instincts. She romped with her mates as unseen and uncomprehended of herself as any young animal, but the flame of her striving spirit made everything full of unread meaning.
Ellen was accounted a most remarkable scholar. She had left Miss Mitchell's school, and was in one of a higher grade. At fifteen she entered the high-school and had a master.
Andrew was growing old fast in those days, though not so old as to years. Though he was far from old, his hair was gray, his back bent. He moved with a weary shuffle. The men in the shop began to eye him furtively. “Andrew Brewster will get fired next,” they said. “The boss 'ain't no use for men with the first snap gone.” Indeed, Andrew was constantly given jobs of lower grades, which did not pay so well. Whenever the force was reduced on account of dulness in trade, Andrew was one of the first to be laid aside on waiting orders in the regular army of toil. On one of these occasions, in the spring after Ellen was fifteen, his first fit of recklessness seized him. One night, after loafing a week, he came home with fever spots in his cheeks and a curiously bright, strained look in his eyes. Fanny gazed sharply at him across the supper-table. Finally she laid down her knife and fork, rested her elbows on the table, and fixed her eyes commandingly upon him. “Andrew Brewster, what is the matter?” said she. Ellen turned her flower-like face towards her father, who took a swallow of tea without saying a word, though he shuffled his feet uneasily. “Andrew, you answer me,” repeated Fanny.
“There ain't anything the matter,” answered Andrew, with a strange sullenness for him.
“There is, too. Now, Andrew Brewster, I ain't goin' to be put off. I know you're on the shelf on account of hard times, so it ain't that. It's something new. Now I want to know what it is.”
“It ain't anything.”
“Yes, it is. Andrew, you ought to tell me. You know I ain't afraid to bear anything that you have to bear, and Ellen is getting old enough now, so she can understand, and she can't always be spared. She'd better get a little knowledge of hardships while she has us to help her bear 'em.”
“This ain't a hardship, and there ain't anything to spare, Ellen,” said Andrew; and he laughed with a hilarity totally unlike him.
That was all Fanny could get out of him, but she was half reassured. She told Eva that she didn't believe but he had been buying some Christmas present that he knew was extravagant for Ellen, and was afraid to tell her because he knew she would scold. But Andrew had not been buying Christmas presents, but speculating in mining stocks. He had resisted the temptation long. Year in and year out he had heard the talk right and left in the shop, on the street, and at the store of an evening. “I'll give you a point,” he had heard one say to another during a discussion as to prices and dividends. He had heard it all described as a short cross-cut over the fields of hard labor to wealth and comfort, and he had kept his face straight ahead in his narrow track of caution and hereditary instincts until then. “The savings bank is good enough for me,” he used to say; “that's where my father kept his money. I don't know anything about your stocks. I'd rather have a little and have it safe.” The men could not reason him out of his position, not even when Billy Monroe made fifteen hundred dollars on a Colorado mine which had cost him fifteen cents per share, and left the shop, and drove a fast horse in a Goddard buggy.
It was even reported that fifteen hundred was fifteen thousand, but Andrew was proof against this brilliant loadstar of success, though many of his mates followed it afar, just before the shares dropped below par.
Jim Tenny went with the rest. “Tell you what 'tis, Andrew, old man,” he said, clapping Andrew on the shoulder as they were going out of the shop one night, “you'd better go in too.”
“The savings-bank is good enough for me,” said Andrew, with his gentle doggedness.
“You can buy a trotter,” urged Jim.
“I never was much on trotters,” replied Andrew.
“I ain't going to walk home many times more, you bet,” Jim said to Eva when he got home, and then he bent back her tensely set face and kissed it. Eva was crocheting hoods for fifteen cents apiece for a neighboring woman who was a padrone on a small scale, having taken a large order from a dealer for which she realized twenty cents apiece, and employed all the women in the neighborhood to do the work.
“Why not?” said she.
“Oh,” said Jim, gayly, “I've bought some of that ‘Golden Hope’ mining stock. Billy Monroe has just made fifteen thousand on it, and I'll make as much in a week or two.”
“Oh, Jim, you 'ain't taken all the money out of the bank?”
“Don't you worry, old girl,” replied Jim. “I guess you'll find I can take care of you yet.”
But the stock went down, and Jim's little venture with it.
“Guess you were about right, old man,” he said to Andrew.
Andrew was rather looked up to for his superior caution and sagacity. He was continually congratulated upon it. “Savings-banks are good enough for me,” he kept repeating. But that was four years ago, and now his turn had come; the contagion of speculation had struck him at last. That was the way with Lloyd's failing employés.
Andrew kept his stock certificate in a little, tin, trunk-shaped box which had belonged to his father. It had a key and a tiny padlock, and he had always stored in it the deed of his house, his savings-bank book, and his insurance policy. He carried the key in his pocket. Fanny never opened the box, or had any curiosity about it, believing that she was acquainted with its contents; but now when, on coming unexpectedly into the bedroom—the box was always kept at the head of the bed—she heard a rattle of papers, and caught Andrew locking the box with a confused air, she began to suspect something. She began to look hard at the box, to take it up and shake it when her husband was away. Fanny was crocheting hoods as well as Eva. Ellen wished to learn, but her mother would not allow that. “You've got enough to do to study your lessons,” she said. Andrew watched his wife crochet with ill-concealed impatience.
“I ain't goin' to have you do that long,” he said—“workin' at that rate for no more money. That Mrs. William Pendergrass that lets out these hoods is as bad as any factory boss in the country.”
“Well, she got the chance,” said Fanny, “and they won't let out the work except that way; they can get it done so much cheaper.”
“Well, you sha'n't have it, anyhow,” said Andrew, smiling mysteriously.
“Why, you ain't goin' to work again, be you, Andrew?”
“You wait.”
“Well, don't you talk the way poor Jim did. Eva wasn't going to crochet any more hoods, and now Jim's out of work again. Eva told me yesterday that she didn't know where the money was comin' from. Jim's mother owns the place, and it ain't worth much, anyhow, and they can't take it from her in her lifetime, even if she was willing to let it go. Eva said she was goin' to try again for work herself in the shop. She thought maybe there might be some kind of a job she could get. Don't you talk like Jim did about his good-for-nothin' mining stock. I've been glad enough that you had sense enough to keep what little we had where 'twas safe.”
“Ain't it most time for Ellen to be comin' home?” asked Andrew, to turn the conversation, as he felt somewhat guilty and uncomfortable, though his eyes were jubilant. He had very little doubt about the success of his venture. As it is with a man who yields to love for the first time in his life, it was with Andrew in his tardy subjection to the hazards of fortune. He was a much more devoted slave than those who had long wooed her. He had always taken nothing but the principal newspaper published in Rowe, but now he subscribed to a Boston paper, the one which had the fullest financial column, though Fanny exclaimed at his extravagance.
Along in midsummer, in the midst of Ellen's vacation, the mining stock dropped fast a point or more a day. Andrew's heart began to sink, though he was far from losing hope. He used to talk it over with the men who advised him to buy, and come home fortified.
All he had to do was to be patient; the fall meant nothing wrong with the mine, only the wrangle of speculators. “It's like a football, first on one side, and then on the other,” said the man, “but the football's there all the same, and if it's that you want, you're all right.”
One night when Nahum Beals and Atkins and John Sargent were in, Andrew repeated this wisdom, concealing the fact of its personal application. He was anxious to have some confirmation.
“I suppose it's about so,” he said.
Then John Sargent spoke up. “No, it is not so,” he said—“that is, not in many cases. There isn't any football—that's the trouble. There's nothing but the money; a lot of fools have paid for it when it never existed out of their imagination.”
“About so,” said Nahum Beals. Andrew and Atkins exchanged glances. Atkins was at once sympathizing and triumphant.
“Lots of those things appear to be doing well, and to be all right,” said Andrew, uneasily. “The directors keep saying that they are in a prosperous condition, even if the stock drops.” He almost betrayed himself.
John Sargent laughed that curious, inflexible laugh of his. “Lord, I know all about that,” said he. “I had some once. First one thing and then another came up to hinder the working of the mine and the payments of dividends. First there wasn't any water, an unprecedented dry season in those parts, oldest inhabitants for evidence. Then there was too much water, no way to mine except they employed professional divers, everything under water. Then the transportation was to pay; then, when that was remedied, the ore didn't come out in shape to transport in the rough and had to be worked up on the premises, and new mills had to be built and new machinery put in, and a few little Irish dividends were collected for that. Then when they got the mills up and the machinery in, they struck another kind of ore that ought to be transported; then there came a landslide and carried half the road into a cañon. So it went on, one thing and another. If ever that darned mine had got into working order, right kind of ore, water enough and not too much, roads and machinery all right, and everything swimming, the Day of Judgment would have come.”
“Did you ever get anything out of it?” inquired Andrew.
“Anything out of it?” repeated the other. “Yes, I got enough worldly wisdom never to buy any more mining stock, after I had paid assessments on it for two years and the whole thing went to pieces.”
“It may come up yet,” said Andrew.
“There's nothing to come up,” said John Sargent. He had been away from Rowe a year, but had just returned, and was again boarding with Atkins, and all the family lived on his board money. Andrew and Nahum Beals were smoking pipes. Andrew gently, like a philosopher, who smokes that he may dream; Nahum with furious jets and frequent removals of his pipe for scowling speeches. John Sargent did not smoke at all. He had left off cigars first, then even his pipe. He gave the money which he saved thereby to Mrs. Atkins as a bonus on his board money.
The lamp burned dimly in the blue fog of tobacco smoke, and the windows where the curtains were not drawn were blanks of silvery moonlight. Ellen sat on the doorstep outside and heard the talk. She did not understand it, nor take much interest in it. Their minds were fixed upon the way of living, and hers upon life itself. She could bring her simplicity to bear upon the world-old question of riches and poverty and labor, but this temporal adjunct of stocks and markets was as yet beyond her. Her mother had gone to her aunt Eva's and she sat alone out in the wide mystery of the summer night, watching the lovely shift of radiance and shadows, as she might have watched the play of a kaleidoscope, seeing the beauty of the new combinations, and seeing without comprehending the unit which governed them all. The night was full of cries of insistent life and growth, of birds and insects, of calls of children, and now and then the far-away roar of railroad trains. It was nearly midsummer. The year was almost at its height, but had not passed it. Growth and bloom was still in the ascendant, and had not yet attained that maturity of perfection beyond which is the slope of death.
Everywhere about her were the revolutions of those unseen wheels of nature whose immortal trend is towards the completion of time, and whose momentum can overlap the grave; and the child was within them and swept onward with the perfecting flowers, and the ripening fruit, and the insects which were feeling their wings; and all unconsciously, in a moment as it were, she unfolded a little farther towards her own heyday of bloom. Suddenly from those heights of the primitive and the eternal upon which a child starts and where she still lingered she saw her future before her, shining with new lights, and a wonderful conviction of bliss to come was over her. It was that conviction which comes at times to all unconquered souls, and which has the very essence of truth in it, since it overleaps the darkness of life that lies between them and that bliss. Suddenly Ellen felt that she was born to great happiness, and all that was to come was towards that end. Her heart beat loud in her ears. There was a whippoorwill calling in some trees to the left; the moon was dim under a golden dapple of clouds. She could not feel her hands or her feet; she seemed to feel nothing except her soul.
Then she heard, loud and sweet and clear, a boy's whistle, one of the popular tunes of the day. It came nearer and nearer, and it was in the same key with the child's thoughts and dreams. Then she saw a slender figure dark against the moonlight stop at a fence, and she jumped up and ran towards it with no hesitation through the dewy grass; and it was the boy, Granville Joy. He stood looking at her. He had a handsome, eager face, and Ellen looked at him, her lips parted, her face like a lily in the white light.
“Hulloo,” said the boy.
“Hulloo,” Ellen responded, faintly.
Granville extended one rough, brown, boyish hand over the fence, and Ellen laid her little, soft hand in it. He pulled her gently close, then Ellen lifted her face, and the boy bent his, and the two kissed each other over the fence. Then the boy went on down the street, but he did not whistle, and Ellen went back to the doorstep, and, looking about to be sure that none of the men in the sitting-room saw, pulled off one little shoe and drew forth a sprig of southernwood, or boy's-love, which was crushed under her foot.
That day Floretta Vining had told her that if she would put a sprig of boy's-love in her shoe, the very first boy she met would be the one she was going to marry; and Ellen, who was passing from one grade of school to another, had tried it.